By the time we pick up with them in 2012, Rust and Marty have both spent plenty of time averting their eyes. Rust went back to Alaska after he quit the force and spent eight years in the bottom of a bottle, blind drunk with good reason, because he didn't want to look back on everything he'd messed up.

Marty has always found it easy to look away; from his family's needs, from his own mistakes, from the past. He quit the force himself some years after Rust, after seeing one horrifying sight too many, explaining: "I never want to look at anything like that ever again." And who can blame him for that, because looking at the corpse of a microwaved baby should not be a part of anybody's day-to-day.

But Rust and Marty told themselves a huge lie back in 1995, and 17 years of looking away has only compounded the damage. "I won't avert my eyes. Not again," Rust tells Marty, forcing him to look too. And it's another horrifying sight – the videotape of Marie Fontenot – that draws Marty back into the game, makes him desperate to help Rust where he's previously been reluctant.

And conspicuously, Rust does avert his eyes as Marty watches the video, because once is enough, and he already had to watch the entire thing to see whether any of the men took off their masks. He doesn't want to shoulder the weight of this alone any more, which is in itself a huge transformation; you can see something lift from him as Marty finally agrees to watch the tape. There's another person on his side now, and he knows for sure that he isn't crazy.

2002 Rust was bitter and alienated and wanted no part of teamwork, but ten years on he's come to understand that alone only gets you so far. If Rust hadn't pushed Marty away in 2002, his investigation probably wouldn't have hit the dead end it did, and another decade's worth of victims could have been saved. Rust spooked Tuttle when he went to question him because he is not a people person, but if Marty had gone in there with his charm and his scotch, he probably could have smoothed things over just like he does here with Lutz and Geraci.

Rust and Marty are both shells of their former selves – Rust with his drinking and his bartending and his brittle eyes, and Marty with his TV dinners and half-hearted dates (the Match.com pickings have got to be slim in rural Louisiana, no?) Rust needs Marty to stabilise him, and Marty needs Rust to open his eyes. "Without me, there is no you" works both ways.

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And they slip so naturally back into their old rhythms, but they don't rub each other the wrong way like they used to; Rust's less steely and Marty's more forgiving. The affectionate "Don't look at me, I ain't never been able to control him," sums it up. Maggie struggles to understand why Marty is helping Rust, because she can't really make sense of the partnership she helped to destroy. Marty can claim he'd throw a drowning Rust a barbell as he wants, but there's too much bonding these guys together: the debt they share, the ways they balance each other out, and the horrors they've both had to see.

So they're back together, just in time for the reckoning. And it's pretty clear that neither one of them necessarily expects to come out of this alive. Marty avoids answering Maggie when she asks: "Did you come here to say goodbye?" and Rust later declines to give her any more reassurance.

But where Marty probably accepts death as a remote possibility, Rust is actively welcoming it. Of all the disturbing things Tuttle's former employee said, the one that got to Rust was "Death is not the end," and he sees whatever's coming not just as a chance to pay his debt, but a chance to "tie off" the cycle of violence and degradation that has been his life. So… that bodes well.

Rust Cohle's Inspirational Quote of the Week:
"Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. Be careful what you get good at."

Leads:

A quick summary of the many, many, many new plot developments this week… Rust has spent the last two years gathering more evidence about the cult, about Tuttle, and about the disappearance of women and children in areas surrounding the Wellspring schools.

Rust used his B&E skills to break into Tuttle's house and steal incriminating evidence (including that horrific videotape), but he didn't kill Tuttle. He tells Marty that was probably done by others as a preventative measure, after they found out what had been taken.

Ledoux's relative confirms a connection between Reggie and DeWall and the man with scars. A former employee of Sam Tuttle tells Rust and Marty about a scarred boy named Childress, who was one of Tuttle's many illegitimate grandchildren. He only liked to have sex with virgins, and he evidently wasn't big on birth control.

Marty discovers that the deputy sheriff who helped to cover up Marie Fontenot's disappearance was his old friend Steve Geraci, who clashed with Rust back in 1995. The cover-up was masterminded by the parish sheriff at the time, whose name was also Childress.

And of course Gilbough and Papania locate the actual man with scars, merrily mowing a flat circle, and they don't even know it. I really enjoyed the fact that they got their own affectionate car bickering to mirror Rust and Marty's.

"You don't look particularly healthy." Is there actually something wrong with Rust, beyond way too many years of drinking and living rough? Since he's pretty much already got a death wish going into the finale, some sort of illness reveal might feel like overkill.

"There's not gonna be a bunch of people coming in and out of this place, is there?" "What do you think, Rust?" Ha. Business is not booming in 2012, evidently.

"You shouldn't have that." "Nobody should have this." Yeah, and while we're on it, why on earth would Billy Lee Tuttle ever agree to this being taped, and then keep the tape in his house? Recording it in the first place seems like a spectacularly bad idea, unless they had some kind of re-watching ritual, but Tuttle has always been portrayed as a pretty canny manipulator who guards his public image incredibly carefully, so Rust finding the tape in his house felt like a bit of a stretch.

Audrey "sometimes decides she doesn't need her meds", so it sounds like she's still unstable. Will she have any significant role to play in the finale, though?

"I don't like this place. Nothing grows in the right direction." This felt just like old times, with Rust being kind of poetically rude and pessimistic about the surrounding town, and Marty quietly rolling his eyes in the driver's seat.

Toby, the rent boy Rust was interviewing about his time at the Tuttle pre-schools, said that he'd always told himself the things he saw at night were dreams – the man wearing animal masks and so on – and Rust grimly tells him he doesn't think they were. Reminded me of Rust's whole speech about realizing that "your whole life has been a dream, a dream you had inside a locked room". In fact, depending on when he spoke to Toby, this might actually have been the conversation that inspired that thought process.